


S.I.B

by natalunasans



Series: Ownership Enough [5]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood, Blood and Injury, Broken Bones, Concussions, Developing Relationship, Discworld References, Domestic Violence, Gen, Happy Ending, Head Injury, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Nonbinary Character, Relationship Negotiation, Self-Harm, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 20:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7004407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/natalunasans/pseuds/natalunasans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>how things were between them when they hadn’t started to trust each other yet, and then a kind of breakthrough.  </p><p>i'm probably being over-cautious with "graphic depictions of violence" because it's more matter-of-fact than that, but the first chapter is kind of grim (see tags) in case you need to skip it. things get way better after that, though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> sorry, i was impatient and did not get a chance to get this beta-ed. any britpicking or other concrit is welcome.
> 
> (writing chronologically backwards right now… this one goes near the beginning of the series)

The Master keeps thinking that if he could just hit hard enough in the right spot he could knock the thing loose. Or kill it. Or whatever. It would help if he could be sure what-the-Other it even is or how it works, but that’s apparently asking too much. All his and the Doctor’s investigations, both telepathic and scientific, have only yielded more questions than answers. Well, they’ve determined how and why - and even when - the noise and the false memories were planted, but these truths do not set him free.

On good days, when the noise is quieter and the pressure isn't as bad, the expectation of it hangs over him. He knows, now, that it’s only been since the timewar, but since he woke up at the end of the world he’s never gone so much as a week without it reaching its loudest at least once. And then there was that night when everything changed, when their people disappointed them not for the first but for the last time, and when he burned up his life-force to blast them away and the doctor burned up a regeneration to replace it. Since then, with his body already damaged from the botched resurrection and the energy leaks, the noise and various sorts of pain have fluctuated between background annoyance and almost unbearable. The ‘almost’ is only because he's still here, and because he likes to be exact.

When it gets loud again he's practically relieved… it's like the other shoe has dropped. But on the worst days, when his whole body aches and he can’t even do anything to escape the sound, he’s nearly incapacitated.

Once he lost his balance in the lab and fell backwards, slamming the base of his skull on a worktable: for a nanospan he thought he'd knocked something loose. Turns out that the shooting pain of hitting his head had distracted him for a moment from the pulse of the drums. 

On the other hand… when you’re that desperate, there is almost no idea too terrible. So sometimes he tries again. Some days he wants to knock his head against the wall but he can't even move enough to get up the momentum. He's tried sticking tools into himself, but always chickens out in the last moment, declining to pierce the skin and navigate the gap at the base of the skull.  He fears the blood and the mess, fears cutting into the brain itself and risking some of the still considerable mental capacity he has left. (Sometimes he catches the Doctor noticing that even with brain damage, he’s still as much a genius as they are. He can’t help it, he lives for those flashes of approval.) Illogically, he still hits the back of his head against things when he gets the chance.  The Doctor, of course, always stops him if they’re near, immobilising him easily with a hug that’s more --and also less-- than comfort. Or, when his whole body down to the very biodata prickles with static pushing them away like the wrong side of a magnet, they’ll put their hand behind his head, forcing him to choose: stop hurting himself or hurt them directly.

At first he has no problem just hitting harder, smashing their hand between his skull and the wall. The first time he does this they wait it out in shocked silence until he tires, then finally scramble away, supporting the bruised hand with the uninjured one. He wishes he could have seen their eyes go wide and the faces they must have made trying not to cry out… but he felt enough of their reaction with each impact. Another time he splits their knuckles when they get between him and a particularly hard bit of decorative moulding. He tells himself he can’t be arsed to clean up their blood. It all repeats the next few times, minus the surprise.  The Doctor always hides from him until their hand heals, but returns after a few hours, compelled by force of duty.

He hasn't had the energy or the will to maintain his old fastidious hygiene habits, and when he becomes too uncomfortable, they bathe him. The Doctor is careful, wary. As they comb matted burnt orange crusts of their own blood out of his hair with ever-clumsier fingers, he tries to revel in the fact that even naked and shivering he still strikes fear in them. He supposes he must be their form of penitence, a way to cancel out the guilt. How convenient that they can still use each other this way! But hurting the Doctor doesn’t  _ really _ make the Master feel any better… he tries not to let himself wonder if it ever has: his life has had so few other constants.

He rationalises that they’re more use to him unharmed and instead of letting them manipulate the situation, he decides to stop hitting his head whenever he senses the Doctor approaching. He still does it in secret, of course. Out of all the things that have happened to him and been done to him, it’s something he can control, and he’s always needed to be in control. He can choose when to make it hurt more, choose at least some kind of release. His hair camouflages the bruising, so perhaps they'll believe he doesn't need to do it anymore. They seem less afraid of him these days, but the levels of mental shielding they're using tell him that the Doctor is still desperately afraid of themself. 

Being the better telepath has its advantages. He can feel the Doctor’s rage building up as the weeks go by, the pressure in their mind nearly matching the pulsing pressure in his own head. 

It’s exhilarating. All that  _ energy _ , all that potential. What will they do to him when self-interest and their sense of fairness finally overcome their best intentions? What will the two of them do to each other? 


	2. Chapter 2

In the end, it’s disappointingly mediocre: more a shoving match than a proper fistfight. 

They haven't been sleeping or eating enough. The Doctor ‘forgets’ (because they aren't sure they should still be alive?); when things get bad the Master can't rest or keep most food down.

A day of sullen silences, finally broken by increasingly angry words: the Doctor’s vindictive, the Master’s ungrateful…  _ If you hate me so much, why are you still here?! _ Who shouts or mutters that last comeback? It could be either of them: the Master could have left, he’d have found a way to manage. The Doctor could have run, it wouldn’t be the first time. But here they are.

They’re both so exhausted and out of practice that they end up injuring each other more by accident than by skill. He’d like to imagine that he lands a solid punch to their wrist, but being realistic he really doesn’t have the strength that day; he’s just lucky to catch them by surprise and this is how they try to break their fall. He’d like to think that the irony is purposeful, but they’re just trying to push him away when he loses his balance and the back of his head happens to connect, not just with the edge of the console, but with one of the levers.

When the Master comes to and figures out what’s happened, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or to rage at the Doctor. He can’t remember being in this much pain from just his head before (either the drums or his own experiments), and that’s saying something. He thinks vaguely that the base of the console is not the greatest thing to lean on, but he’s definitely not moving... wants to see if the tickle at the back of his neck is his own blood, but his shoulders are stiff and his arms too shaky to obey. He tries to look for where the Doctor landed but he can’t seem to focus. He closes his eyes again and groans, then immediately regrets making any sound. He can hear the Doctor whimpering; they sound so far away. He opens his eyes in the direction of the noise and sees only indistinct shadows. At some level he knows he is probably concussed, but this blurry vision lark is starting to make him nervous. 

“Doctor?” 

“Fuck off.” Their voice is heavy and dull.

“I can't see.” His voice shrills and cracks; this is not the calm anger he was going for.

“I don't care.” 

They haven't even got their sonic screwdriver out to assess the damage… he'd hear its whirring even over the pounding in his head. Fuck, the drums haven't gone. 

He imagines inserting a pliers up the back of his own skull, pulling out the… whatever it is… he always imagines it as another white point star diamond, although that's impossible or it'd have shown up on scans. It’s not like sticking tools in there could hurt any more than it does right now.

“Glad you’re being honest for once, Doctor!”

“Like you'd even know the meaning of the word.”

“You're no different to me. Why not just give in and enjoy it?”

There's a silence. Not from surprise; this is the same row they’ve been having for centuries. The Doctor must be gathering their strength to deliver a lecture on ethics…

Instead he hears an awkward scramble, a muffled curse as they don’t manage to get up without putting weight on the injured wrist, then shadows resolve into the low res form of the doctor that passes right in front of him before walking slowly and deliberately away. 

They left him, they sodding left him. Alone in the tardis console room for once, but the one time he could never hope to hack into anything. The Master moves his arms and legs just to make sure they still work, but everything feels heavy and he's never been so tired. Fatigue outbalances anger and pain; he gives in and lets himself slip into sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

It isn’t supposed to work like this. You can watch scraps of someone’s dream if you’re nearby when they fall asleep unshielded, but it’s normally not possible to _share_ each other’s dreams without some sort of telepathic link. With that stupid pitiful fight they’ve somehow managed to smash something more than the Doctor’s wrist and the Master’s skull… Some barrier has also been broken down.

_He’s walking at night, the sky is full of stars but as far as he can see, there’s only an endless desert of the same black sand that shifts under his bare feet. He hears and feels a rhythm beating: in his head? or another’s feet pounding the strange ground? He knows who it is. He’s afraid._

_It’s not Death on his horse, it’s the Doctor, running. Always bloody running. One arm swings at a sickeningly wrong angle and a part of him wants to cry out to them, “stop, you’re hurt!” but he doesn’t. The Doctor rushes unseeing past him, has almost gone out of sight before they do a double take and stop short. They walk back, slowly, reluctantly? to where he has sat down in the sand._

_“I know you,” says the Doctor. “You’re the Master. You… change people.”_

_He’s hunched down now, curled in on himself, the pounding only getting louder. This isn’t fair, well, it sort of is but he’s never going to admit that even to himself._

_“But I’m me,” says the Doctor, and he knows without opening his eyes that they’re holding out their good hand towards him._

_He reaches out, lets them help him up, and they walk out across the dark sand together._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dream references [the end of Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods](http://natalunasans.tumblr.com/post/113434144511/), which is definitely in the TARDIS library, and i like to think both of them have read it.


	4. Chapter 4

The feeling of being watched startles him awake. The Doctor sits on their haunches, peering out at him from under that ridiculous quiff of tousled hair. Wide amber eyes, red-rimmed, sparkle with what might be hope or just mania. They gesture with the sonic in their left hand (the right, clumsily velcroed into a splint, rests at an awkward angle on their knee).

“Right, let's have a look at you!”

The Master stares at him, eyes just as wide. “Where am I? What's happened?  _ Who are you? _ ”

The Doctor almost  _ almost _ falls for it, but in the last moment must have caught the twinkle in his eye or the curl of his mouth, and bursts into nervous laughter that lasts just a little too long.

“Oi, not so loud!” the Master finds himself able to cover his ears with his hands, though his neck and shoulders are still painfully sore. He doesn’t need to exaggerate his headache, but does anyway, just to twist the knife a bit… the Doctor’s guilt is still almost too easy a target.  He thinks that if he never hits his head again it will be too soon. He’ll need to find something else to try.

He gestures at the Doctor’s arm, “you’ve fastened that all wrong; give it here?” He feels as much as sees them swallowing their fear like a strong drink, almost relishing the admittedly stupid risk of giving him yet another chance.

It would take very little effort for him to re-fracture their wrist and hurt them really badly, but he suddenly has no desire to. It’s more interesting, he rationalises, to surprise them and see how they react. He feels to make sure the bones are still aligned correctly, and adjusts the brace carefully so it’s just tight enough to hold the splint stable. 

“Ouuuw!” Now that they’ve decided not to be afraid of him, the Doctor apparently feels free to complain. “Sorry, I know you’re not  _ trying _ to hurt me.”

“No, but I was last night.” It’s the closest he’ll get to an apology, and he expects the Doctor to react with indignation. He’s underestimated them again.

“I know; so was I.”

 

The Master manoeuvers carefully out from under the console, fighting back nausea every time his head shifts. “If you’re going to look at me like that, you can sod off,” but when the Doctor looks crushed, he flashes them that smile that could charm blood from a stone.

After scanning the back of his skull, they declare “no fractures, unf- I mean fortunately,” which would have worked if it didn’t hurt to laugh. The Doctor produces a handkerchief (clean, for once) and a bottle of disinfectant from one of their jacket pockets. The Master half expects the rest of the contents of the med bay to follow… any Time Lord with a good enough tailor or an obliging enough TARDIS can have transdimensional pockets, but the Doctor always takes things to extremes. They struggle with opening the bottle one-handed, until it occurs to him to help. 

“We’re getting too old for this…” They scrub at the blood on the back of his neck and hold up the cloth for him to see that there really was quite a lot of it. 

“Yeah. Maybe we should retire?” He’s in enough pain that he almost means it. They look up in surprise; even without telepathy it would be obvious that both are imagining almost identical scenarios of tedium. Before long, the Master is leaning his head on the Doctor’s shoulder and the two are shaking with silent laughter.


	5. epilogue

Tension has been diffused and they’ve remembered who they are and who they used to be, but nothing is ever that simple with these two. 

They’ll rest. Some things will heal, some will not. 

Tomorrow or next week, they’ll be fighting again, their disagreements as fundamental as their need. The Master will still scheme in secret; the Doctor will still pretend to be the one that’s got it all together. They’ll always find ways to hurt themselves and each other, but just for variety, the Master hardly ever hits his head on the walls anymore.

They’ll continue their adventures in time and space, learning with many trials and even more errors to work around the unpredictable rhythm of the Master’s health. The Doctor helps, when help is possible… They’re not alone, and maybe that’s ownership enough.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to @autisticzombie for medical tips and @yellowbessie for psychology tips
> 
> thanks to writers of every d/m fight fic i've read: i tried to do something different in order not to repeat your work and because i'm not good at the exciting stuff anyway...


End file.
